copy of the Letter sent to the Minister of Patents in India about their website

Dear Nirmala Sitharaman,

I am writing to you to bring to your cognizance an issue that might require policy change with Indian Patent record system that is hampering researchers like me. I am writing to you to propose that there might be a policy rethinking required on broader scale on how knowledge sharing will remain open and easily accessible to a global audience and researcher on the Indian Patent website.

I am a Webmaster by trade and an Independent Researcher. I am a native New Yorker and graduate of NYU Tandon (in Downtown Brooklyn). I am working on a research project that compares Open Source Patents focused on a programming language called Python. I have a lot of time that I have placed in troubleshooting with my Python programmer a way in which to scrape text based data from your site with little success.  My interest is on Open Source technologies and Patents in Python.

http://www.ipatents.us

I also saw that the Indian Patents infrastructure is not a part of Google patents and doesn’t support scraping leave aside any advanced scraping support which is offered on US patent websites (such as queries to sort patents). This came as a surprise to me considering that I would believe India to be the second most open place (outside USA) for sharing information and supporting Open Source culture. This is another area that needs a new way of thinking and reform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents

Additionally, I would like to know if it is possible to buy the patent data on a CD or packet from the patent office? But I didn’t find an option to do that. My intent is to do text analysis to see patent growth in a particular field of technology.

For example, dates that I am interested in are August 1 through the 12th of 2017. We are researching a comparison of the Patents granted by the USTrademark Office website records and the Patents granted by your office on the same dates. We are in the process of blogging this activity as it unfolds so will be including this letter as part of our research activity. I’d like your suggestion on the best way to approach this inequity and furthermore if there are opportunities to be a part of the change toward betterment of overhauling the way it is currently set up.

API link for the USTrademark Office Patent Information: http://www.patentsview.org/api/doc.html

I thank you for your time and attention,

Diane Ludin